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Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?

Cloned distros? I installed debian lenny on my HP/Compaq laptop, but could not figure out how to get the broadcom wireless working. All the recipes failed. After tiring of the struggle, I finally wiped the disk and installed the current version of ubuntu. The wireless worked immediately with no special effort n my part, so I think there's a little more there than just "cloning" as the author naively suggests.

As for the whole question of setting up someone with the power and authority to "ban" distros he doesn't like, that's a pretty disagreeable idea on several levels.

If we're doing away with all cloned distros, we're going to have a very short list. Even Slackware was based on SLS, but since SLS no longer exists, I guess we could still count it.

Let's see, of the major distros, we have Slackware, Red Hat, and Gentoo. That's pretty much it. There are undoubtedly a bunch of minor distros which are roll your own, but I don't know much about them.

As someone who spends a good bit of time watching the sausage being made, I can say that a lot of effort is put into
-getting fixes back to Debian
-getting fixes to upstream

As with all of free software, some projects are more receptive than others, some packages attract more effort than others, and there are sometimes clogs in the pipeline. I'm not arguing the author's argument about the kernel patches, but I think Ubuntu does plenty of good work at the application layer that gets upstream.

By means of 'IP-enforcement' sounds like the only way to me. Maybe some ip-filter 'wall' that certain countries have. But quite hard to ban any such thing I think, given the possibility of IP-tunnels to circumvent walls and given the inability of the 'IP-industry' to enforce their IP when it came to AACS LA '09 f9'.

That's it, the perfect idea springs to mind. An article about how Mono, Ubuntu, and Microsoft should be banned from society, and it would also mention how GPL should be depreciated in favour of BSD, and maybe how vi is better than Emacs.
Great idea!

Only all this stuff should be in a coherent article, that's a bit of a problem. Something about Monosoft .BUNTU maybe?